Considering LEGO's history of licensed sets, it's no surprise that Traveller's Tales' series of LEGO Star Wars games is such a success. Although LEGO has adapted tons of famous IPs into buildable sets over the last few decades, LEGO Star Wars has remained a core part of its brand, adapting all kinds of specific Star Wars moments and bringing every new movie or show to life. With that in mind, the hype around LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga makes sense. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga looks like a highly ambitious game that brings LEGO Star Wars' rich history together under one roof.
Naturally, The Skywalker Saga's ambitious design raises questions about what's next for Traveller's Tales. While The Skywalker Saga has new mechanics that it can offer future games, the work that went into making it also creates some intriguing possibilities for what kind of IP Traveller's Tales adapts next. According to one of its recent developer videos, many of the NPCs and playable characters in the game had to be designed from scratch rather than being based on official LEGO figures. That experience could help TT make a LEGO game for an IP that hasn't interacted with the core brand much, if at all.
The Skywalker Saga's Character Design
As a general rule, the LEGO Star Wars series and its peers base each minifigure off the designs found in real-life LEGO sets. That makes sense; Traveller's Tales would be making a lot of extra work for itself if it made its own design for every character rather than capitalizing on familiar minifigure designs. However, The Skywalker Saga has so many characters from such specific corners of Star Wars lore that Traveller's Tales didn't always have real counterparts to design characters around. It had no choice but to manually design minifigures for many of The Skywalker Saga's characters.
This process undoubtedly created a lot of extra work for developers over the last few years. However, when looking to the future, that extra work could turn out to be extremely valuable. Now that Traveller's Tales developers have so much extra practice designing minifigures from scratch, it could design characters for other franchises. There are tons of IPs that only have a limited number of LEGO sets but all the right stuff to make a compelling LEGO game.
Possible Future LEGO Games
There's no shortage of short-lived LEGO sets that could inspire elaborate new games from Traveller's Tales. For instance, there's a few classic TV shows that LEGO has touched on only briefly, like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Scooby-Doo. Alternatively, Traveller's Tales could make its own adaptations of certain recent sets based on video games like Overwatch or Horizon Zero Dawn. There may not be many official LEGO products to base a game on for these IPs, but The Skywalker Saga may have prepared Traveller's Tales to design all the assets it needs.
A LEGO game based on a surprising property would be a breath of fresh air after The Skywalker Saga. As great as the upcoming game looks, LEGO Star Wars and LEGO superhero games have dominated Traveller's Tales' library in recent memory. Now is the time for something entirely new to join the LEGO game family. After The Skywalker Saga, Traveller's Tales ought to use its new experience to take its core franchise in a different direction.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga releases April 5, 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
